


small hands in the palm of mine

by Luthor



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:54:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2119254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: Outlaw Queen present, Swan Queen past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	small hands in the palm of mine

**Author's Note:**

> I'm... relatively uncertain about this, but we'll see where it goes. So far, it's a two/three-shot (the rating may change, so look out for that), but nothing's certain yet. The fic/chapter titles come from Keaton Henson's 'Small Hands', which is lovely and a little sad, but separated from its context and those two tiny words can bring to mind a whole lot of images which relate to Regina and her relationships with the characters involved. 
> 
> I'd love feedback on this, but I get that this won't be everyone's thing. I'm not so sure on it myself, but I'm eager to continue. Just a head's up: this chapter is very heavy in the Regina/Emma interactions, but the next one will focus on Regina/Robin for sure.

_Can you have Henry this week?_

It’s the second time the text has been sent out since Emma first turned up on Regina’s doorstep with a pharmaceutical gift baggie, only this time she’s not taking no for an answer. The kid’s still at school when she arrives, and Regina’s mood has decidedly worsened since the last time she saw her (as has the pallor of her skin, and, apparently, her sickness).

“What are you doing here?” Regina grunts, and Emma takes that as invitation and slips past her, indoors. She’s already kicking off her boots by the time Regina manages to shut the door again and burrow further into her oversized fluffy robe. “I hope there are nausea tablets in there,” she says, nodding towards the all too familiar paper bag that Emma’s holding (a new one, of course, but she doubts the contents are dissimilar).

Nudging her boots into some kind of order, Emma stands up and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Look, I know this is really fucking awkward, but if I don’t do this, I know you won’t.” _Or anybody else_ , she mentally adds.

Regina narrows her eyes. “This isn’t necessary.” And when Emma opens her mouth to speak: “By which I mean I’d much prefer it if you didn’t.” She wishes her words had more bite to them, but every time she opens her mouth her stomach threatens to crawl up her throat. Needless to say, coming across as a colossal bitch isn’t at the forefront of her priorities right now.

“You’ve felt like shit for nearly a month—”

“It’s barely been three weeks—”

“And when was the last time you had your period?”

“That’s none of your goddamn business.”

Emma stares at her, slack jawed. “You can’t just ignore this. What if you’re—”

“I’m not.” She takes a step forward, jabbing a finger first at the paper bag, then at her door. “And you take that right back where you got it from. It’s a bug, it’ll pass.”

Emma sighs, shakes her head, and pitches one hand on her hip. “And if it doesn’t? If you wake up one morning and there’s a lump the size of a watermelon beneath your shirt?” Regina scoffs, but it doesn’t deter her. “Just take a test.”

“I’m not taking a test.”

“Well, too bad; I’m not leaving until you do.”

Regina opens her mouth to argue, but the words catch. Nausea, again, like a head-butt to the stomach. She touches her fingers to her lips, pushing them in, pushing it down, and Emma pales with her. Her free hand comes out to Regina’s arm, and if Regina wasn’t about to throw up, she’d stop herself from being led towards the downstairs bathroom, maybe.

She vomits up what little she’d managed to eat for breakfast, and Emma stands partially inside the bathroom, partially outside of it, doing a poor job to both hold Regina’s hair back and keep herself from gagging right along with her.

Once she’s heaving up nothing but guttural grunts of air, Emma pulls at the toilet paper and hands her an unnecessarily long strip of it. It gets flushed down with the rest of the vomit, but when Emma releases her hair and steps back into the hallway, Regina remains on her knees. She hears the paper bag rustling behind her, and thinks she’s going to throw up again.

She doesn’t.

On shaky legs, she stands.

“So,” Emma starts, and she hasn’t quite managed to work the grimace off her features. Regina just huffs, knocks into her as she brushes past, and grabs the bag out of her hand.

“Wait here,” she tells Emma, because she’s not having somebody gawk at her while she pees (even if said somebody is her ex-wife), and she’s not facing this alone, whatever the outcome. _Whatever the outcome_. She already knows what it is, because karma’s a bitch and so has she been.

(And her period is late, by a month or two. She’s trying not to count it. And yesterday she sat and dunked Henry’s favourite cookies into her tomato juice for half an hour before she realised that it probably shouldn’t taste as good as it did.)

So she goes to her en suite and she locks the door, and ten minutes later she returns downstairs, stoic and silent, and places the pregnancy test on the breakfast table that Emma’s sitting at. She’ll thoroughly scrub it down later, she thinks absently, and falls into a seat.

“Well?”

When Regina says nothing, Emma pitches herself over the table to see the results, and her stomach plummets. She doesn’t know why she’s surprised – she’d called it the second Henry had told her, with all the concern of a young boy who had grieved his parents’ divorce less than a year prior, that his mom had been throwing up constantly for a solid week.

She sits back in her chair, looks up to Regina, and tries to think of something to say. What she manages is, “You’re sleeping with guys again?” She winces as soon as she finishes, before Regina’s disdainful stare can even reach her face.

“I’m not a lesbian, Emma,” Regina tells her, words slow, collected, like she’s talking to a child. She doesn’t necessarily answer the question, but leaves Emma to her own conclusion. (Emma’s only all too familiar with that technique.)

“I know, I’m sorry.” She bites her lip and shuffles in her seat, thinks maybe the stool is just super uncomfortable, and then realises she’s just really tense. “Do you know whose it is?”

That earns her another disdainful stare; she’s on a roll today.

“You assume I fell out of ten year long relationship and straight into promiscuity?”

Emma’s eyes narrow at the words, but her hands rise to show Regina her palms. She’ll face no judgement from her. “I just meant,” she begins, slower, “Henry hasn’t said anything about you… dating anyone.”

“You suspect he would?”

That throws Emma, because honestly? Yeah. The divorce had hit him hardest, she’d always known it, still feels guilty for it, but they’d have only done him more harm if they hadn’t have split. Emma has first-hand experience with foster parents who had hated each other, and it had never benefitted her any.

She rubs a hand along the back of her neck, now, pitches forward so that her elbows are resting on her knees. Regina looks far more composed, to say she was the one throwing up ten minutes before, but then Emma’s never expected any less from her.

“I thought he’d mention it, I guess, yeah. We… talk about those things.” Regina eyes her keenly, then, and it’s a look that is without its typical malice, so she elaborates. “The divorce, and stuff.”

“And _stuff_?”

Emma catches the emphasis there, and cringes faintly.

“Well,” she says, “we talked about Ruby when, y’know…”

Regina nods silently, and after a moment adds, “I do.”

She remembers those conversations well herself – or tantrums, she should call them; it had been the first time Henry had realised that this wasn’t one of their regular arguments. Sure, Emma had moved out and they weren’t on speaking terms, but Regina remembers their relationship as volatile – it had been bad before, not always, and not intentionally, but he’d expected the two of them to come creeping back together like they always did, forging compromises and promises, building back the bridge they’d both attempted to hack to pieces.

With Henry standing in the centre of it, it had always been hard to follow through with the threat to leave, to give up, and when they inevitably had, Henry had been dragged down under by it.

Their split was overdue, Regina knows, but she can still look across her sitting area and see Emma slouched in the chair that she'd always favoured, and she knows she’ll probably always love her. In the end, they hadn’t been good for each other, and even less so for Henry. This was better, she’d had to tell herself, and perhaps only recently has she started to actually believe that.

In the only way that Emma Swan knows how to deal with awkward silences, she fidgets and squirms, shifts position twice and drums her fingers on her knees. Regina comes back to herself, and when she meets her gaze again, Emma lets out a sigh.

“So,” she says, and her eyes fall to the pregnancy test with nothing short of disdain.

She should be happy for Regina – probably is, somewhere, but there’s too much going on inside her head for her to make any sense of what she’s feeling, and _that_ , at least, she is certain she does not like.

Regina catches her look (feels something twist inside her and thinks she knows exactly how Emma is feeling), and follows her gaze to the pregnancy test. Positive. Of course, positive. “Yes,” she says, and frowns, and looks away from Emma’s confused stare. “I know who the father is.”

Emma nods her head. “Oh.” Because she can’t deal with silence any more, and ‘good’ would have been a lie. “Right.”

Regina nods her head, as though they’ve agreed on something.

Perhaps they have.

“Should I—” Emma starts, loses her nerve, but ultimately tries again. “Do you… want anything?”

Regina thinks about that, actually considers it for a moment. Within seconds, less than, perhaps, she knows exactly what she wants, but Emma is no longer the person she goes to with these things, even if they are attempting to forge this strange kind of friendship that neither of them have succeeded with in the past, but both will stick with, for Henry’s sake.

She shakes her head, finally, dismisses Emma and waits until she’s left (with a meek and awkward farewell), before she disposes of the pregnancy test and sprays the coffee table with anti-bacterial spray.

She’ll do the rest of the housework later, seeing as she’s stuck at home anyway, and then, when she can think past her own churning stomach, she’ll call _him_ , and maybe then she’ll feel better about this whole mess.


End file.
